


redneck yacht club

by silentwalrus



Series: caveat emptor [3]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, a mild case of the ol’ repression, narrowly avoided wet t-shirt contests, post-canon if you’re into THAT, pre-slash if you’re into that, redneck pool, spontaneous alchemical landscaping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:27:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25009207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus
Summary: July in Central makes Roy want to move to Briggs. July in Command in Central makes Roy want to move to fucking Drachma, where he can die simultaneously of frostbite, hypothermia and bear attack and pass into his next life as a protozoa or whatever with a smile of true bliss on his face. Maybe he can convince Olivier to declare war up there so he can have an excuse to visit. She’d kill him, but at least he’d die cold.
Series: caveat emptor [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1790881
Comments: 72
Kudos: 723





	redneck yacht club

**Author's Note:**

> this was not part of the plan but it was so hot here the past couple of days and if i cant go to the pool then by god at least someone will

July in Central makes Roy want to move to Briggs. July in _Command_ in Central makes Roy want to move to fucking _Drachma,_ where he can die simultaneously of frostbite, hypothermia and bear attack and pass into his next life as a protozoa or whatever with a smile of true bliss on his face. Maybe he can convince Olivier to declare war up there so he can have an excuse to visit. She’d kill him, but at least he’d die cold. 

Command is an old building even after reconstruction, stone all the way through, with big, sunny windows and heavy, solid walls. In winter Roy wears two pairs of socks and a wool undershirt; in summer he’s rolling ice cubes in his mouth when he’s at his desk, the saddest and least effective concession to heatstroke prevention when he’s got to be in full uniform at all times. Every window in the building has a fan in it. Less than a third of them are working. More enterprising and resourceful officers have hooked theirs up to portable generators to work at full capacity, because an entire capital city drawing full tilt on a fledgling electric grid means they’re all on rationing rotas; HQ should theoretically be entitled to full power, but Roy and eight others on the Council had voted to voluntarily reduce their consumption to maintain all state medical facilities at full power instead, and the motion had passed. 

He’s regretting it now. There isn’t a single unwilted shirt collar in the entire building. The sharp uptick in earthquakes after the Promised Day is what gave wings to Roy’s crusade to turn the State Alchemist program as much as possible onto construction and engineering, but despite the growing number of universities churning out bright-eyed civilian alchemists it’s still a constant uphill battle to get power grids and railways and telephone lines laid and repaired and working. To say nothing of the water mains and sewage lines. If someone comes around and tries to kill Roy now he just might let them, because the very thought of pulling his heavy, thick ignition gloves onto his sweat-damp hands is enough to make his shriveled soul want to cry dehydrated, oversalted little tears. 

Everyone is overheated and miserable and longing to go home, and while Roy would not call himself a merciful boss he has a standing policy of ‘get out if your work is done’ and has spent the past week dismissing everyone at half to five. It’s not like home is too much better, not with the citywide rationing, but at least there he can spend an hour in an ice-filled bathtub and sleep naked on the workroom cot in his basement, the one place that’s a few degrees cooler than the baking night outside. He’s considered leaning into his growing reputation for eccentricity and switching the entire department to work nights more than once, but even that won’t help much; the only thing that cuts the summer heat on the Central plains is the thunderstorms. 

The drive home provides a sandblasting breeze through the car windows that’s arid enough to have Roy deciding to order spontaneous parade ground drills the next time the sky so much as hints at rain. He will stand out there with the ceremonial sword and hat and shout the orders his damn self if it means he gets soaked through with something other than sweat. What’s the point of having power, after all, if not to go self-indulgently insane every once in a while and drag everyone nearby along with him. 

The house is quiet when the driver pulls them into the garage, and Second Lieutenant Peters meets him at the door with a salute and an all-clear report. “But Major - uh, Mister Elric is here,” Peters adds, as Roy moves to unbutton his jacket. “He’s out back.” 

Roy stops short. “What? What the hell for?” Horrible premonitions bloom one after another. “Did he have some kind of animal with him?” 

“No sir. He didn’t say, sir. He did have, uh, cement, though, sir.” 

_“Cement?”_

“And cinderblocks. You did say anyone from your team can enter the house if they needed to…”

Roy heads directly to the back. The yard is aggressively landscaped thanks to some previous tenant, so there’s no obvious sign of Ed at first; he fully expects to find him bricking up the doors and windows or building a statue of himself or something back here, so it’s almost a relief for a moment. Then survival instinct kicks in and reminds him that this is actually a deeply suboptimal tactical position and that just because you can’t see an Elric doesn’t mean it can’t see you. 

There are clues almost immediately, however: the uncoiled hose leading from the house, the discarded paper wrappers from bags of dry cement. One unzipped motorcycle boot, then another. The hedges around the yard are tall enough to ensure relative privacy and Roy hasn’t gotten any calls from his communications director today, so either whatever Ed’s doing back here barefoot hasn’t been very noticeable or he’s eliminated the witnesses, but just because this Elric endeavor hasn’t blown up yet doesn’t mean it won’t later. Roy passes a discarded level and rounds the last bed of hydrangeas before the patch of open lawn that he’s fairly sure is supposed to be used for croquet, and finds Ed has dug a hole in his backyard. 

Ed has not just dug a hole. He has also lined it, filled it with water, and - Roy should not be surprised - gone ahead and gotten right in it. Ed is shoulder deep in a little square cement-lined swimming pool, arms folded on the edge, hair wet and slicked back and eyes closed with his cheek on his elbow, by all appearances dozing in the sun. 

He raises his head before Roy gets within a yard of him, but he must have been genuinely asleep because instead of the usual cross-eyebrowed faceful of disgruntlement Roy just gets Ed blinking up at him, blurry and vaguely disoriented. His eyes are enormous when he’s not squinting like a bulldog with a toothache. 

Roy has a lot of questions and a lot of complaints, but he’s also just spent nine hours in a melting crucible masquerading as a military office so naturally the stupidest one falls out first. “Why is this only four feet square?

“Why bigger?” Ed says muzzily, the squint beginning to form. “S’a pool hole. Fills up fast. Gets the job done.” 

Roy stares down for a long moment, but the only thing his brain wants to do is echo _pool hole_ in his skull over and over like a broken record. Pool hole. Gets the job done. The water is deep, lapping at Ed’s shoulders. Roy crouches down, puts his hands together and presses them to the dirt. 

Alchemy crackles. Ed yelps, but Roy’s not used to working with earth and stone and can’t pay attention to his theatrics at the moment. The pool hole expands, widening out and packing the dirt around it, which is good considering the layer of cement has to be stretched thinner to accommodate the new dimensions. There’s no filtering system or drains, just a cement tank full of water, so it hardly takes a minute to leave Ed sputtering in a basin that’s now a good ten feet wide, the water now somewhere around his calves. 

“Bastard! What the fuck was that for?” 

“Why are you in _jeans?”_ Roy demands. 

“Because the pool was done and I didnt want to change, fuck you! I was _napping!”_

“In my backyard,” Roy says pointedly. “Which you showed up to of your own accord, and decided unconsulted needed extensive landscaping.” 

_“Extensive?_ Which one of us just jacked this thing across half the lawn?” 

_“My_ lawn.”

 _“Yeah_ _your lawn,_ you’re the only person I know with a yard that’s not full with like, chickens or whatever.” 

_“Chickens?”_ Roy can’t help but scan the bushes for rogue animals. 

“Or _whatever,_ my point is you don’t even use it! Now get the fuckin’ hose, you ruined the fuckin’ water level.” 

Roy stands up, hefting the hose to the pool’s edge with his boot as he heads to the back deck, unbuttoning his jacket. He does genuinely intend to make it all the way inside, take all this off and put on swim shorts that he does in fact have, but removing the heavy uniform jacket feels like surfacing from a swamp and by the time he’s reached the patio furniture he’s peeling off his undershirt. He detours briefly to turn the tap and get the hose running, then shucks his socks, takes everything out of his trouser pockets and rolls the legs to the knee. He leaves everything else on the deck chairs and heads back onto the grass barefoot, ready to ruin his uniform pants beyond recovery if it means cooling off. It’s terrible when Ed has good ideas. 

Ed has pulled the hose over the edge and left it to run into the water while he transmutes what looks like steps on the other side of the pool. Roy lowers himself in, sits down into the water and pulls the hose over his head, closing his eyes and letting it stream directly over his shoulders. 

Bliss. Roy is never getting out. In fact he’ll be taking all of his meetings here from now on. Riza might frown, but only for as long as it’ll take for her to try it too. Tomorrow morning Roy is stoppering up all the doors and windows in Command and flooding HQ. 

There’s some sloshing nearby, and Roy opens his eyes to find Ed also sitting down across from him, legs out in front of him, submerging to the waist. It’s odd to see him with his hair out of his eyes; it does a lot to hide how round his face is, and Roy’s somewhat bemused to realize Ed likely wears it down for the same reasons Roy slicks his back: to make him look older. Having the jawline of a truck doesn’t help much when you also have the cheeks of an angry hamster. Roy finds himself smiling slightly as he ducks his head back under the water, letting his own hair sop down over his forehead. 

“Whoa, we match.” 

Roy glances up and finds Ed looking at his midsection - at the scarring, he realizes. Ed gestures back to his own abdomen, and Roy sees they do, in fact, match - somewhat. Ed has a thick knot of warped tissue over his hip, burgundy and bright pink and purple so dark it’s almost black, and it’s more raised but also much smaller than Roy’s own - his scar is bigger, his side ropy with burned tissue, the skin melted around the initial puncture wounds and standing out much more starkly against his fishbelly skin. 

“Same side and everything,” Ed says. “Does it fuck with you when you twist?”

“No,” Roy says, then finds himself saying, “I had surgery, a few years ago. They removed most of the keloids, improved the mobility. It used to be much more raised.” 

It’s a wholly unnecessary piece of information to share, but then again, it isn’t as though Ed can use it for anything, or would even think to want to. He’s hardly even listening, looking down at his own stomach again. “Like mine?” 

“Somewhat like yours, yes.” Roy had known that Ed had gotten badly injured fighting Kimblee and that the injury had been on his side, the way he’s sure Ed knows all about what happened with Lust; Alphonse was there, after all, and generally what one Elric knows so does the other. This is their first time seeing it on each other: Roy’s familiar enough with the massive scar on Ed’s shoulder, between Ed’s preference for sleevelessness and him gleefully exploiting Breda’s squeamish streak by showing off the shaved-down steel bolt still embedded in his collarbone, but Roy hasn’t seen this one before. 

“It’s all different colors from your hands,” Ed says, almost thoughtful. “Is that from surgery too or is it just like that?” 

“They’re from different types of injuries. Yours are different too,” Roy points out, ignoring the automatic urge to rub the thick ridges across his palms. 

Ed pulls a face and rolls his shoulder. “Yeah, but this one’s weird. None of my normal scars look like this.” 

This is true: all the other scar tissue Roy can see - knuckles, biceps, surgical seams on his clavicle and chest - is dark where the shoulder is streaked white and pink. “Like, these are all different types of injuries too, technically. But it mostly looks the same,” Ed says, briefly touching his left biceps, his collarbone. “‘Cept for, y’know. Where fake ass god welded my arm back on like a cheap muffler.”

Roy can’t help but snort. “The wonders of occult biology.” 

“Yeah, someone better fuckin’ write _that_ case study.” Ed pulls another, squintier face of displeasure. “Only it’d have to be me or Al, and I don’t say this often, but I speak for both of us when I say we don’t wanna fuckin’ know.” 

“Agreed.” Roy’s eyes track down the sun-catchingly light hair on Ed’s belly and chest, highlighted further by the contrast to his skin; the dappled scar on his abdomen is a whorl of saturated reds amidst the bronze. It seems like he puts on more muscle every time Roy sees him, his frame building steadily outwards even if not necessarily upwards, and Roy’s familiar enough with both Armstrong and the various routines of hand-to-hand specialists to recognize the bulking as deliberate, not just the results of sport or daily labor. 

Had Roy still been growing at twenty-two? He supposes he must have been, though probably only in millimeters. He can’t even blame an adolescence of military boarding school meals for that: Chris has photographs of his parents and Roy can definitively say neither height nor breadth are in abundance in his pedigree. Ed’s shoulders are wider than his now, by a solid margin. He has no idea whether Ed’s build is affected by years of automail or whether he would always have ended up this way; Alphonse is comfortably over six feet and just as broad in the shoulders last Roy saw him, but it’s entirely possible Ed just takes after his mother. 

Or the other way around. It’s not like Roy got a look at the infamous Van Hohenheim, what with being consummately blind during their brief coexistence during the Promised Day. For all he knows the Elric brothers hardly look anything like their parents at all. 

They sit in silence for a while, the pool gradually filling up and the sun slowly creeping towards the horizon. At some point Ed drifts over from his side to Roy’s, where the nearby bushes and the angle of the pool wall provide some shade; Roy lets his eyes slip closed completely, head lolling back against the cement. 

“Good, ya?” 

“This in no way mitigates what you owe me,” Roy says without opening his eyes. 

“You are _so_ ungrateful,” Ed complains. 

“Build me a pool filter, then talk. This will be a mosquito infested algae pit in a week without a water treatment system.” 

“So hire a pool boy. Isn’t that what this whole ass house is for? Waving your dick around at the other Generals like you’re just another one a’them? Make your security detail clean the whole yard shirtless while you pound martinis and give your slut rumors a hand. Hardly anyone’s been talking about your sex dungeon lately.” 

“You leaving here in wet jeans will do the same thing without me having to pay anyone,” Roy mutters. “Or suffer through what Peters thinks is the correct way to make a martini.” 

“You wouldn’t even make your own martinis? I mean, I _thought_ I knew how lazy you were…” 

“Selling lies requires commitment to the bit.” 

“Uh huh, sure.” There’s some quiet splashing as Ed resettles. “So. When are you gonna be the boss?” 

Roy reaches over with his eyes closed, finds a handful of wet hair and tugs as though he intends to dunk Ed underwater. Ed cackles, dropping backwards into it and splashing around. “Wow, how many people have asked _that_ in the past month?” 

Roy feels a metal ankle hook against his and pull. “Grumman taking a week off to go play poker with his bocce club buddies in East doesn’t mean he’s about to abdicate,” he grunts, forced to open his eyes as Ed somehow destabilizes him despite the fact that they’re half-floating in water. “Or that it will be my office even if he does.” 

“Yeah, bet you’ve said _that_ twelve and a half times this week,” Ed says as Roy catches his balance on the wall. “No one fucking gossips like an Amestrisan soldier, huh - hey!” 

It’s a lot more difficult to shift Ed’s weight when he’s got an entire metal leg as anchor, but all that means is Roy has to work harder. He gets one foot in the back of Ed’s flesh knee and plants a hand against his pec, pushing just enough to topple a yelping Ed underwater. He feels more awake than he has in days, whether from the ongoing relief from the day’s heat or the sudden awareness of Ed as a body beside him; whatever else Ed may bring into Roy’s life, he’s always a disruption, and it’s impossible to feel stuck with him in the mix. From the start Ed’s been one of the people that reminds Roy that there’s more than stupid mistakes and worse intentions in the world, that he can still feel emotions that aren’t boredom or rage. It’s not surprising, Roy thinks with some ruefulness, that generally what he returns is pigtail pulling. 

Though if Ed didn’t want his tail pulled he wouldn’t make it so fun. 

There’s an eruption of water, and Roy suddenly finds two big arms snaking him into a wet headlock from behind. “Shitass bastard,” Ed splutters in his ear. “Don’t think I won’t drown you.”

“And?” Roy says, making no pretense of struggle. It wouldn’t do any good, and in any case that’s not how he wins here. “It’ll do me a favor. Death is the only thing that’ll keep me out of the office tomorrow.” 

“Hawkeye’ll just take you in anyway and prop up your corpse,” Ed says, but he seems to realize at the same time Roy does that if he’s not about to snap Roy’s neck and put him out of his misery then he’s just giving his head a hostile kind of hug. 

“But I won’t be there to feel it,” Roy says, just a fraction of a beat too late, the delay caught on the slide of Ed’s skin as he moves away. 

“It’s too hot to be a cadaver,” Ed says, but he’s also a beat off, sinking back into the water. “You’re gonna have to find a way to slack off without my help.”

“A pity.” Roy closes his eyes again, his back finding the cement once more. 

The silence returns for a moment, warm with the chirp of evening birds and the slow ripples of Ed resettling next to him in the water. “Seriously. You just gonna let Grumman sit in the chair until he corks it?” 

“It’s an option.” 

“Why?” 

Roy sighs. “We’re still years out from demilitarization. Aerugo is barely keeping to the ceasefire agreement and Drachma is a dozen feuding, raiding, geographically scattered tribes disguised as a country anyway. There’s work to do as war minister, and I can do it.” He keeps his eyes closed. Some things are easier to look at in the dark. “In any case. The position was always a means to an end. One man in power is just a man. If change is going to last, it can’t live and die when the man does.” 

And if having the Flame Alchemist as Minister of War got their neighbors’ hackles up, having him as Fuhrer or President or whatever damn title you slap on a dictator is going to be so much worse. No, Roy’s not sure that becoming head of state is the path to take anymore at all, not when the state itself needs so much work. 

“Well, shit changes, I guess,” Ed says after a moment. “Even really big shit. Like, I was gonna get my arm n’leg back after Al, and look how that went.” 

“Successfully.” 

“Oh, sure. Got the arm. Got Al. But it sure as shit didn’t go like we planned, or even dreamed of in our worst nightmares. Plus, y’know. Still got this.” 

Roy briefly cracks an eye to see Ed’s automail foot surface in front of them, toes wiggling. “Plans change. Point is, what matters is getting the job done.” 

Roy can’t say it doesn’t mean anything to have Ed essentially deliver his potato-stamp of approval, but to say so would be a fundamental betrayal of their relationship. “Goodness. Such wisdom.” 

“Don’t sound so surprised. We both know I’m smarter than you,” Ed says easily. “Though like, if it’s not Grumman and it’s not you, then who? Armstrong?” 

Roy resettles more comfortably against the cement, rolling his neck. “Havoc.” 

Ed guffaws. “President _Havoc!_ Oh, fuck yes, yes _please._ I’d vote for _that.”_

“Provided we have voting.” 

“Yeah, get on that,” Ed says comfortably, still audibly grinning. “I wanna see him in that stupid fucking hat and sash.” 

“And the sword, and kaftan, and medals,” Roy muses. “He’d be miserable.” 

“Except for the part where you’d have to salute him.” 

“Oh, don’t worry. If Havoc is our commander in chief then you can be sure I’m either safely dead or a civilian.” 

“Oh no, no wimping out there, bastard,” Ed says cheerfully. “You put Havoc on the throne, you better be prepared to live in his Amestris.” 

“I already live in his Amestris. The man’s my deputy chief of staff.” 

“That just means he goes around spreading your slutty rumors and getting free booze and dinner from every asshole who wants to suck your dick-budget,” Ed says. “Shit, what a job. I’d almost be jealous if I didn’t know he’s not allowed to punch people.” 

There’s a thought. Roy’s not going to offer Ed work even though he is very much a licensed, state-recognized contractor these days; Ed’s picky about the projects that aren’t disaster relief and Roy knows better than to come to the table unless he has something good. “Still bored at school?”

“School’s been over for weeks, bastard,” Ed says amiably. “The semester ended in May.” 

“Will you be going back?” 

“Yeah, why not. Al likes it.” 

“And you?” 

“Dunno.” Ed splashes a bit. “Kinda like being a dropout.” 

“You don’t lose dropout status just because you return for later accreditation, you know. You could be a dropout with a poetry degree.” 

That makes Ed cackle again. “Didn’t I tell you? I failed that whole class!” 

Roy opens his eyes to stare at the opposite wall in academic bafflement. “You can _fail poetry?”_

“Yes! Final marks said I demonstrated a blatant refusal to engage appropriately with the material and I should take the grading as a lesson on the efficacy of doing things solely out of spite.” Ed’s grin is pure wicked delight. “I’m gonna take it again.” 

Just how bored _is_ Ed? “Expecting different results?” 

“Well, this one’s gonna be the reading course this time. Not the, like, workshop thing where they tell you that reorganizing the periodic table of the elements isn’t poetry even if you make it rhyme.” Ed rolls his eyes. “The guy thinks _I’m_ doing shit out of spite and he wants to tell _me_ what poetry is? Get fucked. Besides, it’s not _my_ fault most of the elements end with -um.” 

Roy closes his eyes again, not bothering to stifle the smile. “I can see you are a treasure to have in class.” 

“Yeah, like, shit, send the guy a postcard or something, tell him _hey asshole, you think you had it bad?_ I’m a fucking angel these days.” Ed huffs a bit. _“Spite.”_

If Roy had more sympathy in his soul he probably would send the luckless professors of Central U a postcard, though more in commiseration than what Ed clearly considers deserved censure. It’s not as though Roy isn’t _still_ feeling his way blind through how to properly handle an Elric, and if _he_ doesn’t get a manual he doesn’t see why anyone else should. The fact that Riza gets prompt, polite obedience from Ed without any apparent effort is a mystery that Roy has finally had to chalk up to Riza’s intrinsic superiority as a human being, and the suspicion that Ed just does not respect men, purely on principle. 

Well, it’s not as though Roy’s ever needed to be respected to get things done. And if he does get Ed back on his staff as a contractor, it’s not as though Roy would want him docile. You don’t bring Ed Elric on _not_ to bite. 

“So,” Ed says after a long moment, in a considering tone that has Roy opening one eye warily. “Which one of us is getting out to turn off the hose?” 

Roy groans, shuts his eyes again and submerges himself to the sound of Ed’s laughter. 


End file.
